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confessions of a mean girl

Girls are mean. We gossip and judge, we rush to share others’ miseries and missteps with each other, and we learn to do this at an early age. We watch our mothers do it and we let our daughters witness us doing it, too. No one is safe from the judgement and ridicule of a group of women and what they share with each other.

Sometimes at night my husband and I lay in bed and watch some type of crappy reality show. (Diva’s on E! is a fave! Man that stuff is juicy.) He often comments about how vicious girls are with each other, and I think it surprises him a bit. Not me. You see, I survived high school and lived in a sorority house for three years. There is nothing like living in a house with all women. You see firsthand how no secrets are really safe, and how easy it is to share someone else’s misery. “Can you believe what she did?” ” How awful did her hair look?” “How can she date that guy, he cheats on her all the time.” We judge how someone behaves and immediately share it with our person, or multiple persons as it often goes. The only problem? It becomes cyclical. We share gossip until it becomes clear that all we say is being judged right back. Their is no trust because if someone shares gossip with you, they are probably airing your dirty laundry, too.

Nothing becomes safe.

Girls are mean. We are taught from an early age to share gossip because it lets us fit in. It becomes a connector. I share with you and you share with me and we can have THAT in common. Except it doesn’t end there, because it never ends with two people talking, it gets shared multiple times because each of us have at least one person we share gossip with. Think right now, do you have a person you can confide it about your personal issues that you know for a fact would never get shared? Not even with their husband or other friend or mom? Do you know anyone who hasn’t shared gossip with you EVER?

I bet not.

Worse yet, I am that person. I gossip and share secrets and judge. I tell my husband stuff and my friends and I let it out all over the place. I don’t like this about myself. I don’t want to be this way.

Now I am not knocking all women and how we are. I have amazing relationships and real connections, where I KNOW if I have something that needs to be kept secret it will. There is just a whole lot of other, less vault type stuff, that gets shared all over. Tell me, if you here something juicy, is your first thought to call someone and share it?

“Can you believe So and So did THIS?”

Could you not share gossip for one day? One week? One year? What if we injected a bit more positivity in our lives instead of feeding into the negativity and knocking each other down? You see, I think it makes us feel better when we share someone else’s misery. It validates us, in a way, and that is pretty sad. I include myself in this. I feel better if I am not doing the absolute worst of everyone I know.

I think a goal for me this year is to try and reduce the gossip and negativity in my life. I’d like to be a safe haven for those around me, I want them to know what they say to me can be trusted and that I’m not judging. I want to be a source of light for those around me.